Love Is Friendship Set To Music
by SongbirdNoodles
Summary: She’s like water under your hands, cool and fluid as your fingers glide over her body." Rory/Paris: A progression in sentences. Written for the LJ 1sentence challenge.


**Love Is Friendship Set To Music**

**a progression in sentences**

_Note: This was written for the 1sentence challenge at Livejournal, so the format is a bit unconventional. Each sentence is a response to one of fifty prompts (from prompt table delta, in case anyone cared), and is thus headed by it's prompt. Enjoy! _

01- Air

"Paris, just take a deep breath," is a constant refrain of hers since Chilton, and you sometimes think that without her reminders, you would have stopped breathing a long time ago.

02- Apples

Cold wind breezes through the Chilton courtyard and as she rushes past you, eyes bright from the wind and cheeks blazing like red apples; and you can't help but stare for a second over the rim of the Bella Abzug biography you're rereading for the fifth time.

11- Earth

Freshman year, you discover that she uses non-bleach eco-friendly laundry detergent, even though it's so much more expensive, and for some reason, that makes you smile rather than scorn.

44- Taboo

The fact that you're sitting up in bed at two AM, staring the curve of your roommate and possibly best friend's body and the way the orange light filtering in through blinds is making her hair kind of glow- that's not a reason to be concerned, right?

40- Spring

The first time you kiss her is during spring break, and though that goes all wrong, you do remember it, cherish the memory of that first, peaceful, vacation together.

06- Dark

Logan's bad for her, and you know exactly why: she dims her light when she's around him, and the darkness makes you sick.

08- Doors

She walks into the door just moments after you kicked out Doyle for no real reason, and that's gotta mean something, doesn't it?

13- Fall

Nothing is as much _her_ as the first day of school, and because she knows it, when you come back to your dorm after the first day of grad school you find a package of pencils and post-its postmarked Iowa waiting for you.

16- Flying

They don't call them the fly-overs for nothing, you think as you glance outside the window and all you see is cornfields, but then you remember that you'll actually be landing here, and your heart skips a beat.

03- Beginning

She picks you up at the airport when she you come visit her in Iowa for her birthday, and when she picks you out of the crowd her face seems to light up, and when she hugs you, you're the one coming home.

04- Bugs

"It's a Quality Inn in Cedar Rapids, Paris," she sighs, her voice implying affection rather than impatience, "so you really don't have to spray for bugs."

09- Drink

The first time it happens is under influence, though that's really no surprise- in fact when she uncorked that third bottle of red wine and slopped half of it over the hotel carpet, you both knew what was about to happen, and all she did was lick her lips.

14- Fire

She kisses you, and it's like blowing oxygen into a nearly-extinct fire, as something insides you flares up again and you deepen the kiss and bore your hands in her shoulders because you'd rather just be burning forever.

48- Welcome

No reason to wait, really, not when it's been coming on for this long, and so she eagerly spreads your legs and takes your hand in hers and places it between them, and the rest, as they say, is silence.

10- New

It's the morning after the night you thought would never happen, and know you should talk, apologize, admit, declare, define, _something_,but you're terrified that if you stick a label on this thing between you, all its value will be lost.

05- Coffee

You hand her a large cardboard cup of coffee as she sleepily sits up in your bed, "Can we talk about what happened?" dangling on your lips, but before you can get there, her smile throws you off balance as usual.

47- Water

She's like water under your hands, cool and fluid as your fingers glide over her body, again and again this weekend because neither of you have had enough of this yet, you've got so much to catch up, and yet, like with water, holding on seems impossible at first.

27- Metal

You fly back on Sunday night, and spend much of the night sitting up, thoughts reeling, playing catch-up in your underheated apartment, and your breath fogs the metal of the picture frame you've been staring at: a smiling girl with bright blue eyes.

36- Secret

You talk for hours on the phone, conversations spanning polling data, when can you come here, what I'd do if you were here, and back to Obama's chances of surviving past this caucus, but still, you wait until you can hear the dial tone again to say the three words that really matter out loud.

50- Wood

She comes to visit, full of stories of the campaign trail to share between hungry kisses and you never make it to the bedroom, and lie on the hard kitchen floorboards afterwords, naked, spent, and holding hands.

21- Head

She drops kisses on your clit almost lazily, and you feel yourself teetering between remaining in control and letting her take over, and then she dips her tounge you and the decision is taken firmly out of your hands.

22- Hollow

You love going to Stars Hollow with her, love the look on her face somewhere between embarrassment and fierce love for her crazy neighbors, love the way she can never quite stop selling the place to you, love the way the small-town folks stare when you plant a kiss right on her mouth in the gazebo.

15- Flexible

_Amazing_, the way she can move her body in ways so that both of you have ample room in her childhood bed- not that you want ample room, when given the option of being as close to her as possible.

35- Roses

Once, you send her twenty white-and-pink roses out of impulse, ordered online and they cost a fortune, but she loves it, and teases you about for weeks.

43- Summer

Summer's almost over, and she's got a pre-convention break and you've got a hole in your schedule between your summer job as an EMT and classes starting again, and so, you decide to go to the shore for a weekend: ice-cream on the boardwalk and rubbing sunblock on her pale skin, and during the drive back, you can't help but thinking that if you died tonight, it wouldn't be so bad.

18- Foot

She painted her toenails red-white-and-blue for Election Day in 2004, and though at the time you lectured her all about how the Democrats wouldn't possibly win, and she was insane for putting so much faith in the American voters, in 2008, in between furiously refreshing her website to see if she's written something new, you do the same.

31- Poison

You never get around to telling her what you've always meant to, what you're sure she knows without you saying it out loud, and now a shadow's creeping into the togetherness you've built that makes saying it impossible.

45- Ugly

The truth is an ugly thing, and because you know her so well you can see it in her eyes long before she knows it herself: that this, too, is not going to last.

17- Food

It's an inheritance of her mother's, handed down like the eating habits and the motormouth: Rory Gilmore, genetically unable to stand being loved.

38- Snow

You brush snow out of her hair as you walk through a festively-lit Boston, holding on tight, and she's squeezing your hand and you can sense that while part of her wants to run, she can't bring herself to do it.

46- War

You almost wish you'd fight, you consider cheating, because the fact that she hates this quite as much you do breaks your heart, but there's nothing you can do, because you're not talking about the growing space between you, this slowly escalating Cold War.

12- End

"I got a job lined up in Beijing after the Election, and I'm taking it" she finally tells you, eyes fixed on a spot somewhere left of your face, and all you want to is scream.

Honor

You're too proud, too principled, too much _Paris_, to do what you want to do: throw yourself at your feet and beg her not to go.

37- Snakes

How treacherous, to have fallen in love with your best friend, because now there's no-one left to tell of your broken heart, no-one left to care that you're as hurt as only she ever believed you could be.

26- Lost

It sneaks up on you, intensifies over a few weeks, this feeling that without her, cheering you on, letting you compete with her, without her believing in you, you're lost.

34- Regret

Two years later, preparing to move to the West Coast for your internship, you find a blank postcard under your bed, showing a smiling cartoon Einstein saying: "Gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love," and the fact that you never sent it threatens to overwhelm you.

33- Rain

It never rains in California, and sometimes you find yourself dwelling about how much she'd hate that, how she loved rainy days and the chance to curl up with a good book without feeling bad, and then it makes you laugh at yourself scornfully: as though the weather were the only problem.

24- Hope

The Obama poster on your wall, the one she mailed you all those years ago is going for hundreds of dollars on Ebay these days, but still you refuse to listen to its message: you refuse to hope; that is, until she calls to tell you she's coming to LA and wants to meet for dinner.

39- Solid

You resist the urge to touch her, make sure she's really there, because if she's not, if this you finally having gone round the bend, then it's really not so bad.

30- Peace

You reach a silent truce as you sit down together, a version of history you'll both accept: that before anything else, you were friends, best friends, even, and that despite everything that happened, you've gone far too long without the other.

32- Pretty

She used to be pretty, now, with short, dark hair and stylish jewlery that accents her eyes, she's nothing short of beautiful, and the fact that she carries herself in a way that makes clear that she knows it makes everything worse.

42- Strange

After that first dinner comes breakfast, a walk along the beach, she's in town for a few days after all, and it's out of sync, but oddly comforting, to be Rory and Paris, without being Rory-and-Paris.

29- Old

You talk on the phone now, laugh about jokes that were funny at Yale, and never talk about the future, just as old friends should

49- Winter

You fly to Connecticut on December 22nd, because you need a proper, East Coast Christmas, and call her once you've landed, because now that you're here you don't want to spend Christmas in a hotel with a big book and room service after all.

42- Stable

She puts you up in her Mom's Inn, takes you out to meet the horses, and there, in the warm, smelly air, she squeezes your hand and whispers clumsily in your ear that you're all she wanted for Christmas, and your eyes sting.

19- Grave

You know you should be delirious, giddy, like a child on Christmas morning, when she tiptoes into your room later that night, but you're somber: you don't quite trust her with your heart.

20- Green

She's brought you a Christmas tree -a tiny one in a flower pot, but a Christmas tree nonetheless- and she decorates it with tiny ornaments as you watch from your bed, and you fall in love with her all over again.

25- Light

Only that's not right: when she dims the lights save for those strung on her tiny Christmas tree, and kisses you in the glow, you realize that you never stopped loving her, and never could.


End file.
